“Eat,” the sister said, “and rest.”
Ana did not know how to interpret that reply but was afraid to push any harder. And truth be told, she was already fading back into a lethargy, retreating from everything she had already learned, needing to forget again … and to lose herself once more in the soothing abyss of sleep.
Chapter 47
It was with dread in his heart that Slater rushed to Nika’s tent. He couldn’t very well knock on the flaps, but he shouted above the wind that he was going to come in and that she should don her mask and gear.
What he saw beneath her goggles was a pair of frightened eyes. The bare lightbulb rigged overhead bobbed on its cord in the billowing tent.
“Let me see your hand,” he said, and like a dog with a wounded paw she held out her palm. With his own gloves he inspected the spot where the needle had punctured the skin. The mark was still evident, but so far it wasn’t inflamed or suspect in any way. A small relief, but not much more than that. The etiology and incubation period of this flu was uncertain, to say the least. “How are you feeling?”
“Scared,” she admitted. Her long black hair was tied in two glistening braids that hung down over her shoulders.
“We all are,” he said. “But it’s going to be okay, trust me.”
“How is Eva doing?”
“I’ve done as much as I can for her here.” Indeed, he had just changed her dressings, replaced several broken sutures, and administered stronger sedation. “But she’s going to be evacuated by chopper very soon. You’re going, too.”
“But I’m all right. If you need the space on the helicopter for—”
“I need you to help me track down Harley Vane and Eddie.”
“What are you talking about?”
As quickly as he could, he explained what he had learned, including the fact that Russell’s frozen corpse had been unearthed outside the church. Nika appeared incredulous.
“He was attacked by the wolves?” she said.
“No room for doubt on that score,” Slater said, before going on to explain what he thought the others had been up to on the island.
“Then there’s no way of knowing what they might have been exposed to?”
“No,” Slater said, “there isn’t. And they don’t know either.”
Nika, fully grasping the gravity of the situation, said, “But can they possibly have made it to shore in that boat? In these seas?”
“For argument’s sake, we have to assume that they did.”
“I should call the sheriff in town,” she said, starting for the SAT phone, but Slater put up a hand to stop her.
“He’s already been notified, and he’s been told what precautions to take for himself and his men.” Slater had also notified the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and the civilian authorities in the state capital of Juneau. What he needed was a tight ring to be formed around the town of Port Orlov, and a wider ring with a ten-mile perimeter to be formed around even that. Northwest Alaska, fortunately, was sparsely populated, and it wasn’t exactly crisscrossed with roads and highways; most of the travel was done by boat and air, and Slater had already arranged for the harbor to be blockaded and the commercial aircraft to be grounded. When he’d encountered any resistance, he’d referred the calls to AFIP headquarters in Washington. By now, he figured, Dr. Levinson was probably planning to put him in front of a firing squad when and if he ever got back.
“Frank,” Nika said, “what’s going to happen to the people in Port Orlov?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “We’re going to stop this thing in its tracks.”
“I just couldn’t bear it,” she said, still sounding fearful, “if what happened in 1918 happened again … and on my watch. I’m the mayor, I’m the tribal elder, I’m the one they trusted. I remember the stories of my people dying in their huts, the dogs feeding on their bodies for weeks.”
“That won’t happen,” he said, holding her hands in his gloves and wishing that he could just strip off all the protective gear — his and hers — and touch her for real.
“My great-grandparents passed down the stories. They were among the few survivors.”
“And God bless your ancestors, because that immunity might have been passed down to you, and others. We’re going to take every precaution,” he said, “just as we have to do, but we will contain the threat.”
Unable to kiss her, or even touch the skin of her naked hand with his own, he bent his forehead to hers and rested it there. And though he was aware of how odd and even comical this scene would appear to any outside observer — a couple in hazmat suits, communing in a rickety, windblown tent — it was also the most intimate moment he had experienced in years. He closed his eyes — it felt like the first time he’d shut them in ages — and if it were not for the distant clatter of propeller blades, he might have stayed that way forever.
“Frank, do you hear that?”
He did. “Get your things together and be ready to go in five minutes!”
Outside, and wiping away the snow that stuck to his goggles, he looked up to see the blinking red lights of the Coast Guard helicopter as it skimmed over the treetops, then circled the colony grounds. Sergeant Groves lighted a ring of flares to mark the spot, and the chopper slowly descended, wobbling wildly and whipping the snow into a white froth. Slater didn’t even wait for its wheels to settle before charging up to the cabin door as it slid open.
“Follow me!” he ordered, and two medics, already swaddled in blue hazmat suits, leapt out into the storm carrying a metal-reinforced stretcher. At the church, Slater kicked the crooked doors ajar and barged inside, the wind blowing a gust of snow like a little tornado all the way down the nave toward the iconostasis.
“In here,” Slater said, stopping to rip open the makeshift quarantine tent.
Eva was barely conscious as he removed the IV lines, gave the medics the latest stats on her condition, and helped slide her onto the stretcher.
“Frank,” she mumbled, “I’m sorry …”
But the rest of her words were lost beneath her mask and in the commotion of her removal.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he said, laying a hand on her frail shoulder.
The medics carried her carefully down the slanting steps and across the colony grounds to the landing pad. Slater saw Sergeant Groves and Rudy hauling the body bag with Russell inside it toward the cargo hatch, and as Groves undid the latches, the pilot jumped out of the cockpit to object to this unexpected and additional cargo.
Even over the howling wind, Slater could hear him shouting, “What the hell are you doing? I have no authorization for that!”
And for Slater it was suddenly as if he were back in Afghanistan, with a little girl dying from a viper bite. “I’m authorizing it,” he declared, and as the medics clambered aboard with Lantos, Nika appeared, ducking into the cabin like a shot. The pilot, even under his own gauze mask, looked confused about what to do about all this, but Slater set him straight. “And now we need to take off!” At such times, it was hard to remember that he wasn’t a major anymore, only a civilian epidemiologist, but he had learned that if he behaved like one, few people were prepared to question his commands. He climbed into the chopper to close any debate.
Seconds later, the props whirring, the helicopter rose into the air, buffeted this way and that as if a giant paw were batting it around; out the Plexiglas window, Slater could see Groves and Rudy, hands raised in farewell, and as he adjusted his shoulder restraints so that they weren’t squashing the little ivory bilikin into his chest — so where was the luck the damn thing was supposed to bring? — he spotted Kozak skidding into view, with the earmuffs of his fur hat blowing straight out like wings on either side of his head, and holding his thumbs up in encouragement. It was a good team, that much he had done right. Lantos groaned as the chopper dipped, then plowed forward, its nose down, soaring just above the timbers of the stockade and the onion dome of the crooked church.